The recent attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, using a nerve gas developed by the Soviet Union, is ghastly and horrifying and deserving of the severest condemnation. But I am reminded of another murder attempt—a successful one, this time—that occurred in Washington, DC on September 21, 1976, of Orlando Letelier, a prominent Chilean dissident and former ambassador to the United States, a murder carried out by agents of Augusto Pinochet, the authoritarian president/dictator of that country.
The U.S., under President Jimmy Carter, sought extradition from Chile of three men accused of the crime, but Pinochet unsurprisingly refused. When Ronald Reagan replaced Carter in the White House, Pinochet had nothing to worry about, and remained in power until 1990. During his rule, which began in 1973 as a result of a revolution supported by the Nixon administration, thousands of Chileans were murdered and tens of thousands were tortured. Letelier’s murder was part of an extensive campaign of assassinations directed at “dangerous” exiles.
Pinochet was heartily supported by the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush administrations, and he won the heart of Margaret Thatcher forever by providing Britain with valuable assistance in the Falklands War, “betraying” his fellow authoritarians in Argentina. Thatcher appeared to regard Pinochet as a true man of the world and received him graciously when he visited Great Britain after leaving office.
Of course, Israel is on record for committing hundreds of “necessary” killings and the U.S., well, our record1 isn’t exactly spotless, including, for example, the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, back in July, 1988, killing all 290 aboard, thanks to a missile fired by the U.S.S. Vincennes, operating in Iranian waters against its orders. The captain should have been court martialed for 290 counts of criminally negligent manslaughter (at least). In fact, he received not the slightest reprimand, and two years later was awarded the “Legion of Merit”— “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service”.
- Literature R Us is so not the blog of record for this sort of thing, but I am a sucker for self promotion. ↩︎
